Not to be confused with the business social network from Jive Software, Jive Hosted VoIP ($29.95 per user per month) is an easy-to-use VoIP (voice over IP) system for small businesses. The premise is simple. Plug in the phones to the Internet, configure the system via a Web portal, and, voilà! Your full-blown business VoIP system is up and running. Jive offers SMBs all the basic calling features along with a few advanced options, such as conference numbers and virtual fax services. It's clear and simple to use, but Jive suffers from an outdated interface, and hasn't added any significant new features in over two years. Meanwhile, business VoIP competitor RingCentral has implemented a raft of new features and integrations, along with lower pricing.

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When it comes to pricing, Jive offers five tiers, depending on the number of users on the system. Tier 1, at $29.95 per user per month, is for organizations with one to four users. This compares with RingCentral's price of $27.99 per user per month for 2 to 19 users. Tier 2, for five to nine users, costs $25.95 per user per month. Tier 3 is $23.95 per user per month for 10 to 24 users, and Tier 4 is $21.95 per user per month for 25 to 49 users. Organizations with more than 50 users are in Tier 5, at $19.95 per user per month. Each plan offers unlimited calling minutes, toll-free and local numbers, and an online fax service.

Getting Started Is a Snap Registration for Jive Communications is quick, and the company works closely with potential customers to get them set up and running. After signing up, we got the relevant paperwork via email, including a request to port over an existing phone number or add new numbers, as well as a quote sheet with our complete payment information. Once our account was activated, we received a fulfillment notice from Jive with the relevant information.

The service let us transfer an existing phone number, request a toll-free number, and request individual numbers for each user. Once the account is active, you can create extensions, assign groups, define call queues, set up your call attendant, and configure many other things, all on the Web interface, even if you haven't set up the phones yet. The call attendant is the automated message customers hear when they first call the company number. After configuring it, we created rules for call forwarding, voice mail storage, call routing, and call blocking, among other things.

Once the system was ready, we were encouraged to schedule a setup call with Jive's support team. This is part user training and part tech support, and at first we were inclined to skip it altogether. We're glad we went through the process, though, because Jive's on-boarding process is very thorough. We talked about different use case scenarios and types of features we should consider, given our environment. The support staff was knowledgeable, and customers with limited telephony expertise will appreciate the time Jive dedicates to teaching them about its system. Even fairly savvy administrators will find the process helpful as they tweak new calling rules during this process.

Like RingCentral, Jive sells phones that have the proper software already installed, making it a matter of just plugging them in, letting the cloud service detect the IP addresses, and assigning the rest of the configuration settings on the phones. We tried using phones we already had to see how that process worked, and we discovered that the phones we had were too old to be supported. The interface for this bit of setup is very straightforward, a simple matter of finding the unit in a drop down box and associating it with an extension previously created. The system takes care of the rest. Jive's support team also provided us with very detailed step-by-step instructions for specific brands so that there's no guesswork for the user.

The number of Web tutorials, PDF cheat-sheets, videos, and reference documents available as a Wiki can be a little overwhelming, but there really is an answer to every question a user may have.

As with RingCentral, businesses switching to hosted PBX from other services or from an on-premises platform should just go with the pre-configured phones directly from the company. While it's possible to go through the interface and set up (supported) devices manually for each user, it can get tedious pretty quickly when the system could be doing all of this automatically. Just toss the older phones on eBay or recycle them and buy the pre-configured phones, which range in price from the $169 Yealink W52P to the $299 Polycom VVX-500.

The Administrator Interface The interface is well-designed and responsive, but it looks a little dated compared with those of RingCentral and other Web-based properties. The pages are not dynamic, so you need to refresh them manually or switch to a different section and come back to see new values or changes. Considering how easy it was to get around the site, it's a minor quibble, but one that makes it look less polished than other services. The interface's URL has the actual company name included, however, which is a nice personalized touch.

There were three tabs on the interface for our test account—Home, Reports, and Admin. Home just lists all the objects in the system, such as individual extensions and calling groups we've created. You can call extensions from this page. Basic users would see only the Home tab. For administrators, the Report dashboard provides a wealth of information, such as total amount of minutes used and number of calls made. One cool reporting capability is a map that shows volume of calls and minutes from each U.S. state. You can also drill down to look at activity by phone number or extension and even see each's call volumes for particular dates. It's a matter of simply clicking on the extension to view or download the full call logs, complete with numbers called and duration of each call. There are a ton of reports available, but there wasn't a way to modify the graphs on the dashboard to customize that view.

All the configuration options are under the Admin tab. We created users first and then assigned available devices. The Combo Wizard allowed us to enter the phone information and associate it with a new user all at once, but the general process was to create users and then later assign the devices.

Jive allowed us to set up call rules such as ringing all the phones in a group simultaneously or a hierarchy to sequentially ring different numbers until someone finally picked up. We were able to have a personal cell phone ring if someone called the correct extension.

Call recording with Jive requires you to set up a separate storage space. By comparison, in RingCentral automatic call recording is simply a built-in feature. With Jive businesses have to set up an Amazon Secure Simple Storage (S3) account for this and provide the Amazon Web Services access code to use remote storage. All calls using Call Recording are stored in the Amazon cloud account. I can see why Jive is staying out of the storage business, but this feature is very limited, and call recording is a fairly basic feature.

We found it really easy to create call-routing rules, and that is the strongest aspect of the management portal. Jive went with a visual mapping tool, in which users drag and drop boxes (representing users and extensions) on the rules-creation page. RingCentral recently added a similar visual drag-and-drop routing tool. Connecting boxes in the Jive interface with arrows and adding priority rules is a very intuitive process.

Jive also offers detailed access-control tools. For example, you can define which users can record new voice prompts, access the administrator portal, make international calls, log in to the voicemail, and provision new devices on the network. There is also an eavesdropping feature, in which specified users can silently listen in on calls in progress.

Jive Hosted VoIP can scale up to larger SMBs, but considering that every single user has to be set up one at a time, it's a little surprising there are no bulk user-management tools. We wouldn't mind using the interface to set up 10 or 15 users, but by the time you get past 20, it gets tedious. It would be nice to have tools that allowed administrators to apply changes to groups of users and handle larger number of users at once. A good workaround, though, is to have all the rules tied to the call group, and just manually add and drop users to the group. RingCentral, by contrast, has added a Templates features that makes configuring multiple users much simpler.

Jive offers call auto-attendant (aka virtual receptionist), company directory, and directory tree features, which are more or less standard in all PBX offerings. You can also upload audio files of your choice to play as the hold music.

Just like Vonage and RingCentral, Jive has a Find Me/Follow Me feature. When you use this feature Jive routs your calls to mobile devices or other external numbers as needed. Other features include call groups, which ring a group of phones at the same time; call escalation—if a user doesn't answer, the system calls the next person on the list and goes up the chain of command; and call queues, in which callers wait for "the next available representative" to be available. Jive required extra steps to set up call recording, and some other advanced features present in RingCentral were missing.

Should You Jive? Whether an SMB is setting up a VoIP platform for the first time or starting over and getting rid of the on-premises system, it's worth taking the time to evaluate a hosted platform before buying. Jive Hosted PBX is easy to get started with and offers administrators a selection of advanced features to enhance its solid basic feature set. We liked Jive Hosted VoIP, especially its graphical interface for mapping out call rules. But the platform suffers by comparison with the feature-rich and more modern-interfaced RingCentral, our Editors' Choice for business VoIP services. Home users looking for a landline replacement should check out our consumer VoIP Editors' Choice, Skype.

Fahmida Y. Rashid is a senior analyst for business at PCMag.com. She focuses on ways businesses can use technology to work efficiently and easily. She is paranoid about security and privacy, and considers security implications...

Michael Muchmore is PC Magazine’s lead analyst for software and Web applications. A native New Yorker, he has at various times headed up PC Magazine’s coverage of Web development, enterprise software, and display technologies. Michael...

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